This is really quite good. It's almost churchlike
within. Very peaceful, and a perfect setting for the artwork.

Photographs by Gregory Colbert

A scene from the NBC show "Law and Order"

February 24, 2005

A Dockworkers' Strike? No, It's Art

By ROBIN POGREBIN

The 45,000-square-foot mobile museum on Pier 54.

A model of the museum.

eople speeding
down the West Side Highway could be forgiven for not looking twice at
Pier 54; the shipping containers stacked there are not an uncommon sight
on the Manhattan waterfront.

But in fact, they are passing not just the historic pier on the Hudson
River at 13th Street where the Titanic's survivors were discharged, but
also a new museum designed by the Tokyo architect Shigeru Ban.

The 45,000-square-foot structure was expressly built to display "Ashes
and Snow," a show of 200 large-scale photographic works by the artist
GregoryColbert
that opens March 5 and runs through June 6 before traveling to
California and the Vatican.

It's not just the show that's going out on the road. The entire museum
is to be packed in 37 of the 148 cargo containers that form its
checkerboard walls. The temporary structure is composed largely of
recyclable materials: the roof and columns are made of paper tubes, the
steel containers stacked 34 feet high are used, and a handmade curtain
to be suspended from the ceiling is made of one million pressed paper
tea bags (used, with the tea leaves removed).

"Shigeru is the Mozart of sustainable architecture," Mr.
Colbert
said. "Also, from a philosophical point of view, he's done some great
public buildings; he says that art shouldn't be for the privileged."

Mr. Colbert, whose work seeks to capture
the mystical relationship between humans and animals, said he approached
Mr. Ban because he admired his use of unorthodox materials. The
architect's previous designs include the paper tube arch constructed in
the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, the Paper Museum and
Paper Church in Japan, and the Paper Refugee Shelter, made of plastic
sheets and paper tubes for the United Nations high commissioner for
refugees.

Mr. Colbert said he wanted the Nomadic
Museum, like those other Ban projects, to seem accessible to a wide
audience.

"The structure shouldn't be intimidating," he said. "It should feel
really inviting. It's a bridge between the arts and the natural
sciences. It's not art with a capital A."

Dean Maltz of Manhattan is the associate architect on the project. The
host of the show is the Hudson River Park Trust, which runs the pier and
is being paid a fee. Constructing the museum hasn't been easy.

"You're building on a pier which is a relic, you're over water, and
you're trying to build in New York," William Goins, the museum's project
manager and producer of an "Ashes and Snow" documentary film, said on a
recent bitter cold day.

As construction continued inside the museum, the shipping containers
offered little protection from the wind, though fabric will be stretched
across the spaces between them.

"People should come with a coat," Mr. Ban said.

He said he was attracted to the project by Mr. Colbert's photographs of
elephants and whales - "quite ancient animals," he said - and the
ephemeral quality of the building itself.

"His incredible idea of moving a huge museum was an interesting
challenge," he said.

Mr. Ban chose shipping containers because they had age. "Traveling all
over the world," he added, "each container has its own history."

Other than those used to transport the museum, the containers will
change with each location.

The gallery's main artery is a wooden walkway bordered by stone-filled
bays over which Mr. Colbert's unframed artworks will hang from thin
cables and suspension rods installed between the 64 columns. The peaked
roof trusses are partly made of one-foot-diameter paper tubes that rest
on the containers and on columns.

The center of the museum will feature a floating library where turned
pages of the artist's books will project images on the walls. A one-hour
film by Mr. Colbert, narrated by Laurence
Fishburne, will be continuously projected on a wall in a theater at the
museum's far end.

Mr. Colbert, a Canadian-born artist,
began his career in Paris making documentary films about social issues,
which led to his work as a fine arts photographer. His first show,
"Timewaves," was in 1991 at the Museé de l'Élysée in Lausanne,
Switzerland.

"Ashes and Snow" is organized by Mr. Colbert's Bianimale Foundation, a
nonprofit arts and nature conservation group he conceived in 2000 with
Giuli Cordara, an environmentalist, the foundation's president.

The exhibition is underwritten by Rolex, which helped support the first
show of "Ashes and Snow" in 2002 at the Venice Arsenale. The museum and
exhibition will be at the Santa Monica Pier in California from Dec. 4
through Feb. 28, 2006, and at the Vatican in summer 2006.

Mr. Ban said that he would redesign the museum slightly each time it
moves "depending on different site conditions" but that neither this nor
the building's impermanence presented a problem.

"Three months or three years is not important for me, because the idea
lasts," he said.

"It can be seen by more people all over the world if it moves," he
added. "Maybe it remains in your memory if it's gone."

Wrenches in Hand, Critics in Hard Hats Take the Measure of Their
Creation

By JOHN FREEMAN GILL

Putting final touches on the Nomadic Museum. "I guess it's some sort of
minimalism," a dock builder said.

s West Side
Highway rubberneckers are well aware, the Nomadic Museum nearing
completion on Pier 54 at West 13th Street is no ordinary exhibition
space. Designed by the architect Shigeru Ban as a traveling home for
"Ashes and Snow," an exhibition of photographs and a film by the artist
GregoryColbert, the museum is a fanciful
45,000-square-foot structure built of shipping containers, giant paper
tubes and a fabric-like roof.

When the show opens on Saturday, critics will have their say. But in
recent months Pier 54 has been nothing more than a vast and bizarre
construction site, and the only museumgoers have been workers in canvas
overalls who have been taking delivery of outsize recycled materials
from river barges and assembling them in an odd and painstaking fashion.

Which invites the question: What do these workers make of what is
probably the most peculiar structure most of them have ever worked on?

"From what I'm told, it's art," said a cherry-picker operator named Mike
Ferry, an expressive smirk spreading across his face as he sat in the
cab of his big machine on a recent afternoon.

William Dandorf, a dock builder, added with a shrug: "It's all for art.
Somebody wants to look at art."

As a groaning red crane hoisted ashore a 34-foot column resembling a
gargantuan toilet-paper tube, a dock builder named Erik Romero squinted
in thought. "I guess it's some sort of minimalism," he said finally. "It
didn't take much to build a huge structure. I mean, it took a lot, but.
..."

Like many of the laborers who had been working seven-day weeks since
construction of the museum began in December, Jeff Blake was finally
starting to take pleasure in looking at the strange building, whose
difficult construction had made the workers virtual strangers to their
families. "The more and more you bring it together," he said, "it looks
nice."

Perhaps because the project has been all-consuming for so long, some
workers are looking forward to showing their families what has been
occupying them.

Among them was Mr. Ferry, the cherry-picker operator. "When it opens
up," he said as he delicately maneuvered three co-workers toward the
pinnacle of a column, "I will bring my wife, because it's part of her
life, too, because of me not being home. I'd like her to see it."

Work is finishing on a colossal temporary
museum, made from 148 shipping containers, on Pier 54 at W. 13th St.

Recently relocated from Venice, the
Nomadic Museum, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, creates a
45,000-sq.-ft. space from the multi-colored steel shipping containers
and recycled paper tubes — used to make the roof.

“Ashes and Snow,” a multi-media exhibit
by artist Gregory Colbert, opens on March 5 in the Nomadic Museum and
runs through June 6. The exhibit includes 199 large-scale photographs
and a one-hour 35-mm film edited by Oscar winner Pietro Scalia and
narrated by actor Lawrence Fishburne.

Ban is known for his structures made from
unexpected materials, including the Paper Tube Arch in the Museum of
Modern Art sculpture garden.

But most here know Ban as the leader of
THINK, one of the architectural teams that proposed a design for the new
World Trade Center site plan. His team’s plan, which imagined two
connecting towers with geometrical steel skeletons, was one of the two
finalists for the project.
The Nomadic Museum’s interior will feature a floating library with
cameras projecting images of Colbert’s books on the walls. Above the
wooden walkway entrance, an almost-translucent handmade curtain made of
1 million pressed paper tea bags from Sri Lanka will fall 40 ft. above
museumgoers’ heads.

Colbert’s photographs comprise the bulk
of the exhibit. Contexualized in a fictional account of a man’s travels,
the photos display Colbert’s own journeys to Asia, Africa and Antarctica
to capture interactions between man and animal.

The Hudson River Park Trust is hosting
the exhibit, which is organized by the nonprofit Bianimale Foundation.
Conceived by Colbert and environmentalist Giuli Cordara, Bianimale
Foundation encourages artistic endeavors to increase public support for
the protection and conservation of animals and their natural habitats.

“I think it’s a wonderful exhibit,” said
Christopher Martin, the Trust’s vice president of public affairs. “It’s
something that’s definitely interesting to see and emotionally moving as
well.”

Martin said there had been no objections
from the community about giving the pier over for three months to the
museum.

“No, not at all. There was a very warm
reception from the community,” he said, noting the proposal was well
received by Community Board 2’s Waterfront Committee. “It’ll be finished
by the time the summer season starts. It’s not the time of heaviest
use.”

Martin said the Trust will get $300,000
in rent from the Nomadic Museum.

Don MacPherson, chairperson of C.B. 2’s
Waterfront Committee, said initially the museum wanted the pier during
the peak summer season and into the fall, but the committee got the
project to change the dates. Also, he said, the committee got the museum
to add one day a week free admission. “We will hold them to it,” he
said. The project was approved by C.B. 2’s full board a few months ago.

Admission to the museum costs $12 for
adults and $6 for seniors and students with I.D. Children under 12 are
free. Tuesdays are “pay as you wish” from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Special
group and educational rates are also available. To purchase tickets,
visit www.ticketweb.com, call 1-866-468-7619 or visit NYC & Co.
Visitor’s Center at 810 Seventh Ave.

Copyright. The Villager. 2005

Pier 54

While the city marvels at saffron-bedecked Central Park, another
massive arts project has been nearing completion downtown, one shipping
container at a time. Called the Nomadic Museum, it will take up all of
Pier 54, on the Hudson River at 13th Street. But as a museum it’s a
rather curious monument: It won’t remain standing for very long. And
its devoted exclusively to the work of one artist.

Photographer Gregory Colbert—who travels the world taking pictures of
people communing with whales, elephants, and other animals— got the
idea (and funds) for the museum after his one-man installation in 2002
at the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale, a vast shipyard dating from the
Renaissance. “Ashes and Snow” was the first solo exhibit ever to occupy
the entire space. And every last piece of art in it was bought up by
the chairman of Rolex, who then encouraged the artist to use the money
to mount the show—as is—in other cities. So, Colbert asked the
avant-garde Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to design a museum large
enough to travel with it. After “Ashes and Snow” finishes its New York
run, from March 5 to June 6, the Nomadic Museum will be taken apart and
reassembled in Los Angeles. Future stops include Beijing and Paris.

“I was looking for a poetic logic to the building,” Colbert says. “I
didn’t want him to make a building he had made.” Known for his clever
use of paper and recycled materials, Ban recently designed a Pompidou
spinoff in Metz, France. For the Nomadic Museum, 148 empty containers
are stacked in a self-supporting grid. Fourteen containers will be used
to ship building materials; the remaining ones will be rounded up at
the museum’s next port of call. “The idea came from the fact that these
can be found in every place the museum will travel to,” says Ban. “I
have not made anything new. I’m just finding a new function for them.”
A tentlike fabric fills in the gaps between the containers and serves
as the roof.

Visitors will enter through the skeletal arch of the old pier, where
the Titanic was to have docked. (The museum is renting the pier from
the Hudson River Park Trust for $300,000.) Inside will be a large
wooden-plank runway, flanked by 6,000 river stones. Colbert’s
photographs will float in the air, suspended between giant paper-tube
columns that help support the roof.

Colbert, 44, doesn’t have a gallery or a dealer. But he does have
collectors, including Donna Karan, who finds his photographs, from
$60,000 to $350,000, a perfect complement for her Zen aesthetic. His
work has an almost preternatural calm, even when it depicts potentially
fraught animal-man encounters. “When you get in the water with a whale,
you don’t think about whether he is going to eat you or not,” he says.
The experience itself is too beautifully distracting. And Colbert’s
goal for the building is the same as for his art. “People need to
restore their sense of awe.”

Inside the Pier
A rendering of the Nomadic Museum. Inspired by Colbert’s Venice
Arsenale show, right, the New York interior will have no natural light.
The installation is a three-part experience. In addition to 100 images,
the show will include a “floating library,” in which pages from an
epistolary novel Colbert has written will be projected on screens. At
the end is a film—narrated by Laurence Fishburne—showing people dancing
with elephants and other cross-species encounters. Admission to the
museum: $12.

Artist and Architect
Gregory Colbert and Shigeru Ban at the Nomadic Museum site last week.
The building is “a paradigm,” explains Colbert. “This kind of
architecture doesn’t exist. It’s not trying to be separate to the work.
It’s organic to the work.” Ban adds that the containers reﬂect
Colbert’s love of “things that age. Each one has its own history.”

The Roof
Its eighteen sections could be lifted into place only when there was no
wind (otherwise they’d blow away), explains Dean Maltz, an architect
who partnered with Shigeru Ban on the project. So, construction workers
put up an American flag near the pier, and when it wasn’t waving, they
knew it was safe to proceed. The crane was too heavy to go on the pier,
so a barge had to be used. It took two months to build the entire
structure.

The Art
Over thirteen years and 33 expeditions (Burma, India, the waters off
Tonga), Colbert has assembled what he calls “a loving exploration into
the nature of animals in their natural habitat as they interact with
human beings.” The people in his work include Burmese monks, trance
dancers, and, of course, Colbert himself.

The Venice Show
Colbert’s 2002 show at the Arsenale was attended by 100,000 people.
“It’s not just going to be a museum,” he says. “It’s a full
experience.” In New York, visitors can buy a handmade three-part book
about the Venice show, which will cost around $20,000. (Other books of
animals are $30.)By Wendy Goodman

Updated: 10:17 a.m. ET Feb. 25, 2005Feb. 25 - Pop quiz: what new
temporary exhibit is a populist artistic event that uses
environment-friendly materials to redefine a historic New York City
space? If your answer was Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates,” you
were close—but wrong.

Denizens of Manhattan’s painfully hip meatpacking district have surely
already noticed the massive structure—148 shipping containers stacked
in an elegant checkerboard pattern, jutting 672 feet out into the
Hudson River—and pedestrians throughout the city may have found
themselves face to face with enigmatic posters of Zenned-out elephants.
For a month beginning March 5, Hudson River Park’s Pier 54 will be home
to the Nomadic Museum and photographer Gregory Colbert’s “Ashes and
Snow,” a one-man multimedia show. “Just as Christo and Jeanne-Claude
put the gates in [Central Park] and changed the way people saw the
park, this is perhaps helping New Yorkers rediscover their riverside,”
the 44-year-old Colbert tells NEWSWEEK.

Disdainful of an art world he calls a “very confined ghetto” and
typical museums he views as “overbearing white cubes,” Colbert decided
to eschew the easy way of showing his photography. The newly reopened
Museum of Modern Art was just not going to cut it. So he commissioned
architect Shigeru Ban, a finalist to rebuild the World Trade Center, to
create a 4,500-square-foot space to house “Ashes and Snow.”

“A lot of people are intimidated by going to certain museums,” says the
photographer. “They don’t feel like they’re sophisticated enough, that
they know enough. People rarely have that feeling when they go to a
concert or see a film or buy books. This structure was meant to be
inviting and not overbearing.” The resulting edifice, the Nomadic
Museum, consists of 148 rented and reusable empty cargo containers that
make up the walls and humungous recyclable paper tubes that serve as
weight-bearing columns. The museum is not only environmentally kind
but, as its name suggests, moveable—the shipping container walls will
be used to transport the entire show to Los Angeles and then on to
Paris, Rome and Beijing.

Looking at Colbert’s 3-by-10-foot photographs, it becomes clear what
appealed to him about Ban’s holistic design, which can be rebuilt to
fit into whatever space is available. The 200 photos that comprise the
bulk of “Ashes and Snow” are epic yet gentle compositions that will
hang suspended in midair between the columns running down the museum’s
nave. Over the course of 13 years in India, Sri Lanka, Tonga and
elsewhere, Colbert has captured surprising images of people dancing,
communing and having sundry special moments with members of the animal
kingdom: Hindu temple members frolic with wizened elephants; bushmen
lie at the feet of habituated cheetahs. Colbert himself is pictured
swimming with a whale. The images, all the more arresting in that they
are unmanipulated and naturally lit, are printed on Japanese paper made
using 300-year-old techniques. “People in photography love to talk
about their toolboxes,” he says. “To me the most important thing in the
toolbox is natural light and the species I collaborate with, be it Homo
sapiens or elephant or whatever.”

The exhibit as a whole can be seen as a sort of manifesto. Colbert, who
counts as his patrons designer Donna Karan and ecologist-entrepreneur
Paul Hawken, echoes Christo’s democratic approach to art; everyone is
welcome and he hopes exhibitgoers re-examine their relationships with
animals. “If you watched the Super Bowl, half the ads had animals,” he
says. “The most frequent contact there is an animal selling them a
product.” It’s hard not to admit Colbert is on to something, even as he
delivers dippy sentiments like, “We have no framework to look with
wonderment in a unified way at these totemic species” and “We humbly
bow to our nonhuman collaborators.” The exhibit was organized by the
Bianimale Foundation, a nonprofit group he cofounded that works for the
conservation of animals and their habitats. And although the exhibit’s
chief patron is Rolex, which helped support a 2002 incarnation of
“Ashes and Snow” in Venice, Colbert insisted that their logo appear
nowhere near the museum.

“Ashes and Snow” will also include a “floating library” with pages from an
epistolary novel written by Colbert projected onto screens. And at the
far end of the museum an hourlong film, with narration by the actor
Laurence Fishburne over footage of dancing gyr falcons and gamboling
pachyderms, will be projected onto a large screen. “I was floored when I
first heard about this [project],” says Gordon Baldwin, an associate
curator for photographs at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “The imagery
has mythic underpinnings. What impresses me most is that they have an
immaculate simplicity. They’re also profoundly moving.”

While Colbert’s photographs are nothing if not peaceful, the museum’s
construction has had its own share of agita. “We’re doing something
that’s basically impossible,” says William Goins, a filmmaker who was
working on a documentary about the show when he signed up to be the
Nomadic Museum’s project manager last August. “There’s nothing
comparable to this anywhere.”

Pier 54, once owned by the Cunard Line, was where the Lusitania first
shoved off and where the Titanic’s stunned survivors were deposited.
Although studies had concluded that the old pier would bear the weight
of the museum, nobody had bothered to calculate whether the cranes
required for its construction could be supported. The cranes now operate
on an adjacent barge but the tubular columns that arrived first were 11
inches too long. Then the steel wedges that make up the roof became
giant kites when river winds swept underneath them as they were lowered
onto the building, nearly dragging a crane into the river. Grizzled
dockbuilders are putting in 12-hour days, seven days a week to get the
structure ready in time. (“Between you and me,” says Steve Medich, an
electrical foreman on the site, pointing to an exhibit poster of a boy
kneeling before an elephant, “I don’t get it.”)

As for Colbert, he stops short of describing himself as an activist, but
he says he hopes his work has an impact outside the art world. It is
about inclusion, he says. It is about reconnecting people to the natural
world. “Is this project a celebration of living nature? Or is this
project a requiem?” he asks. “We’re going to find out probably in the
next 15 to 20 years.” But for the time being, he remains a cautious
optimist.